Webb space telescope glimpses most distant star known to exist

Named after a "Lord of the Rings" character, the star is 12.9 billion light-years away from Earth and was first discovered using the Hubble's gravitational lensing ability.

The Earendel star, as glimpsed by the James Webb Space Telescope, is the most distant star ever seen, 12.9 billion light-years from Earth. (Photo courtesy of NASA, ESA/Cosmic Spring JWST) Aug. 3 (UPI) -- The most distant star known to exist in the universe has been spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope. It comes just months after scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope announced the star's existence. Earendel, named after a Lord of The Rings character, was discovered using the Hubble's gravitational lensing ability. The star is 12.9 billion light-years away from Earth, the most distant object ever recorded, according to NASA. Gravitational lensing extends the range of telescopes by detecting objects through bent light from objects that are behind black holes. When the bent light passes by the black holes the light behaves as though it were passing through the telescope lens. An image of the star, seen through the James Webb telescope, was released Tuesday by a group of astronomers at Cosmic Spring JWST. The Webb is the most powerful telescope ever launched into space and uses infrared technology to view objects farther away from Earth than previously possible. "JWST was designed to study the first stars. Until recently, we assumed that meant populations of stars within the first galaxies," astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland wrote in a paper in May. "But in the past three years, three individual strongly lensed stars have been discovered." The astronomers said this "offers new hope of directly observing individual stars at cosmological distances." The JWST was designed to see the very first galaxies formed in the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. Earendel, known as WHL0137-LS, is in the constellation Cetus. It is not visible to the naked eye.

Astronomers discover unusual monster galaxy in the very early universe

W. M. Keck Observatory (stock image).

An international team of astronomers led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, has found an unusual monster galaxy that existed about 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old.

Dubbed XMM-2599, the galaxy formed stars at a high rate and then died. Why it suddenly stopped forming stars is unclear.

"Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy," said Benjamin Forrest, a postdoctoral researcher in the UC Riverside Department of Physics and Astronomy and the study's lead author. "More remarkably, we show that XMM-2599 formed most of its stars in a huge frenzy when the universe was less than 1 billion years old, and then became inactive by the time the universe was only 1.8 billion years old."

The team used spectroscopic observations from the W. M. Keck Observatory's powerful Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration, or MOSFIRE, to make detailed measurements of XMM-2599 and precisely quantify its distance.

Study results appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

"In this epoch, very few galaxies have stopped forming stars, and none are as massive as XMM-2599," said Gillian Wilson, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCR in whose lab Forrest works. "The mere existence of ultramassive galaxies like XMM-2599 proves quite a challenge to numerical models. Even though such massive galaxies are incredibly rare at this epoch, the models do predict them. The predicted galaxies, however, are expected to be actively forming stars. What makes XMM-2599 so interesting, unusual, and surprising is that it is no longer forming stars, perhaps because it stopped getting fuel or its black hole began to turn on. Our results call for changes in how models turn off star formation in early galaxies."

The research team found XMM-2599 formed more than 1,000 solar masses a year in stars at its peak of activity -- an extremely high rate of star formation. In contrast, the Milky Way forms about one new star a year.

"XMM-2599 may be a descendant of a population of highly star-forming dusty galaxies in the very early universe that new infrared telescopes have recently discovered," said Danilo Marchesini, an associate professor of astronomy at Tufts University and a co-author on the study.

The evolutionary pathway of XMM-2599 is unclear.

"We have caught XMM-2599 in its inactive phase," Wilson said. "We do not know what it will turn into by the present day. We know it cannot lose mass. An interesting question is what happens around it. As time goes by, could it gravitationally attract nearby star-forming galaxies and become a bright city of galaxies?"

Co-author Michael Cooper, a professor of astronomy at UC Irvine, said this outcome is a strong possibility.

"Perhaps during the following 11.7 billion years of cosmic history, XMM-2599 will become the central member of one of the brightest and most massive clusters of galaxies in the local universe," he said. "Alternatively, it could continue to exist in isolation. Or we could have a scenario that lies between these two outcomes."

The team has been awarded more time at the Keck Observatory to follow up on unanswered questions prompted by XMM-2599.

"We identified XMM-2599 as an interesting candidate with imaging alone," said co-author Marianna Annunziatella, a postdoctoral researcher at Tufts University. "We used Keck to better characterize and confirm its nature and help us understand how monster galaxies form and die. MOSFIRE is one of the most efficient and effective instruments in the world for conducting this type of research."

Other researchers taking part include Daniel Lange-Vagle and Theodore Peña of Tufts University; Adam Muzzin and Cemile Marsan of York University, Canada; Ian McConachie and Jeffrey Chan of UCR; Percy Gomez of Keck Observatory; Erin Kado-Fong of Princeton University; Francesco La Barbera of INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Italy; Ivo Labbe of Swinburne University of Technology, Australia; Julie Nantais of Andrés Bello National University, Santiago, Chile; Mario Nonino of Astronomical Observatory of Trieste, Italy; Paolo Saracco of Astronomical Observatory of Brera, Italy; Mauro Stefanon of Leiden University, Netherlands; and Remco F. J. van der Burg of the European Southern Observatory, Germany.

Wilson led the W. M. Keck Observatory data acquisition. Forrest led the processing and analysis.

The study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA.

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Materials provided by University of California - Riverside. Original written by Iqbal Pittalwala. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A fast radio burst tracked down to a nearby galaxy

Gemini telescopes, Mauna Kea, Hawaii (stock image).

Astronomers in Europe, working with members of Canada's CHIME Fast Radio Burst collaboration, have pinpointed the location of a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) first detected by the CHIME telescope in British Columbia in 2018. The breakthrough is only the second time that scientists have determined the precise location of a repeating source of these millisecond bursts of radio waves from space.

In results published in the January 9 edition of Nature, the European VLBI Network (EVN) used eight telescopes spanning locations from the United Kingdom to China to simultaneously observe the repeating radio source known as FRB 180916.J0158+65. Using a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the researchers achieved a level of resolution high enough to localize the FRB to a region approximately seven light years across -- a feat comparable to an individual on Earth being able to distinguish a person on the Moon.

A 'very different' location for an FRB

With that level of precision, the research team was able to train an optical telescope onto the location to learn more about the environment from which the burst emanated. What they found has added a new chapter to the mystery surrounding the origins of FRBs.

"We used the eight-metre Gemini North telescope in Hawaii to take sensitive images that showed the faint spiral arms of a Milky-Way-like galaxy and showed that the FRB source was in a star-forming region in one of those arms," said co-author Shriharsh Tendulkar, a former McGill University postdoctoral researcher who co-led the optical imaging and spectroscopic analyses of the FRB's location.

"This is a very different environment for a repeating FRB, compared to the dwarf galaxy in which the first repeating FRB 121102 was discovered to reside."

CHIME team's hypotheses in line with observed data

The discovery lined up with a number of ideas CHIME/FRB researchers had put forward following their initial detection of the burst in 2018.

"The FRB is among the closest yet seen and we even speculated that it could be a more conventional object in the outskirts of our own galaxy," said co-author Mohit Bhardwaj, a McGill University doctoral student and CHIME team member.

"However the EVN observation proved that it's in a relatively nearby galaxy, making it still a puzzling FRB, but close enough to now study using many other telescopes."

Zooming in on the radio sky

Since it began operation in the summer of 2018, CHIME has detected dozens of fast radio bursts, greatly accelerating the rate of discovery of these transient astrophysical phenomena. With over 1,000 antennas, CHIME's large field of view gives it a much greater chance of picking up fleeting bursts than conventional radio telescopes that are able to observe only a small area of the sky at a time.

When it came to pinpointing FRB 180916, the CHIME/FRB team worked closely with their EVN colleagues to determine exactly where to point the VLBI telescopes.

"By recording and processing the raw signal from each of the antenna elements that make up CHIME, we were able to refine the source position to a level close enough for EVN to successfully observe and localize multiple bursts from this FRB source," said co-author Daniele Michilli, a McGill University postdoctoral researcher and CHIME/FRB team member.

FRB's proximity opens the way for further study

At half-a-billion light years from Earth, the source of FRB 180916 is around seven times closer than the only other repeating burst to have been localized, and more than 10 times closer than any of the few non-repeating FRBs scientists have managed to pinpoint. That's exciting for astronomers because it will enable more detailed study that may help narrow down the possible explanations for FRBs.

"We have a new chance to perhaps detect emissions at other wavelengths -- x-ray or visible light, for instance," said McGill University astrophysicist Victoria Kaspi, a leading member of the CHIME/FRB collaboration. "And if we did, that would be hugely constraining of the models."

About the CHIME Fast Radio Burst Collaboration

CHIME/FRB is a collaboration of over 50 scientists led by the University of British Columbia, McGill University, the University of Toronto, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). The $16-million investment for CHIME was provided by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the governments of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, with additional funding from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The telescope is located in the mountains of British Columbia's Okanagan Valley at the NRC's Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Penticton. CHIME is an official Square Kilometre Array (SKA) pathfinder facility.

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Materials provided by McGill University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A fast radio burst tracked down to a nearby galaxy

Gemini telescopes, Mauna Kea, Hawaii (stock image).

Astronomers in Europe, working with members of Canada's CHIME Fast Radio Burst collaboration, have pinpointed the location of a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) first detected by the CHIME telescope in British Columbia in 2018. The breakthrough is only the second time that scientists have determined the precise location of a repeating source of these millisecond bursts of radio waves from space.

In results published in the January 9 edition of Nature, the European VLBI Network (EVN) used eight telescopes spanning locations from the United Kingdom to China to simultaneously observe the repeating radio source known as FRB 180916.J0158+65. Using a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the researchers achieved a level of resolution high enough to localize the FRB to a region approximately seven light years across -- a feat comparable to an individual on Earth being able to distinguish a person on the Moon.

A 'very different' location for an FRB

With that level of precision, the research team was able to train an optical telescope onto the location to learn more about the environment from which the burst emanated. What they found has added a new chapter to the mystery surrounding the origins of FRBs.

"We used the eight-metre Gemini North telescope in Hawaii to take sensitive images that showed the faint spiral arms of a Milky-Way-like galaxy and showed that the FRB source was in a star-forming region in one of those arms," said co-author Shriharsh Tendulkar, a former McGill University postdoctoral researcher who co-led the optical imaging and spectroscopic analyses of the FRB's location.

"This is a very different environment for a repeating FRB, compared to the dwarf galaxy in which the first repeating FRB 121102 was discovered to reside."

CHIME team's hypotheses in line with observed data

The discovery lined up with a number of ideas CHIME/FRB researchers had put forward following their initial detection of the burst in 2018.

"The FRB is among the closest yet seen and we even speculated that it could be a more conventional object in the outskirts of our own galaxy," said co-author Mohit Bhardwaj, a McGill University doctoral student and CHIME team member.

"However the EVN observation proved that it's in a relatively nearby galaxy, making it still a puzzling FRB, but close enough to now study using many other telescopes."

Zooming in on the radio sky

Since it began operation in the summer of 2018, CHIME has detected dozens of fast radio bursts, greatly accelerating the rate of discovery of these transient astrophysical phenomena. With over 1,000 antennas, CHIME's large field of view gives it a much greater chance of picking up fleeting bursts than conventional radio telescopes that are able to observe only a small area of the sky at a time.

When it came to pinpointing FRB 180916, the CHIME/FRB team worked closely with their EVN colleagues to determine exactly where to point the VLBI telescopes.

"By recording and processing the raw signal from each of the antenna elements that make up CHIME, we were able to refine the source position to a level close enough for EVN to successfully observe and localize multiple bursts from this FRB source," said co-author Daniele Michilli, a McGill University postdoctoral researcher and CHIME/FRB team member.

FRB's proximity opens the way for further study

At half-a-billion light years from Earth, the source of FRB 180916 is around seven times closer than the only other repeating burst to have been localized, and more than 10 times closer than any of the few non-repeating FRBs scientists have managed to pinpoint. That's exciting for astronomers because it will enable more detailed study that may help narrow down the possible explanations for FRBs.

"We have a new chance to perhaps detect emissions at other wavelengths -- x-ray or visible light, for instance," said McGill University astrophysicist Victoria Kaspi, a leading member of the CHIME/FRB collaboration. "And if we did, that would be hugely constraining of the models."

About the CHIME Fast Radio Burst Collaboration

CHIME/FRB is a collaboration of over 50 scientists led by the University of British Columbia, McGill University, the University of Toronto, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). The $16-million investment for CHIME was provided by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the governments of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, with additional funding from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The telescope is located in the mountains of British Columbia's Okanagan Valley at the NRC's Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Penticton. CHIME is an official Square Kilometre Array (SKA) pathfinder facility.

Story Source:

Materials provided by McGill University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A tiny Galaxy with a Big Heart!

Photo: Hubble image depicting galaxy ESO 495-21 at the center. From NASA/ESA

Evolution of our understanding of Black Holes (BH) has gone from the mathematical outcome with no physical counterpart, up to their detection at the center of various galaxies and visualization of their shadow through the reconstructed image presented for the first time just a few months ago by the EHT global initiative (https://resonancescience.org/the-first-image-of-a-black-hole-is-finally-here/). Now it is thought that every galaxy hosts a BH in its core. When the first BHs were inferred from cosmological observations, we believed they were an extravagant exceptional behavior in the universe. Since, they have proven not so exceptional as they are detected with increased frequency, but they remain an extravagancy, and not for the same reasons.

ESO 495-21 is a galaxy just 3.000 light years across in diameter, very small compared to the almost 53.000 of our Milky Way galaxy. Located 30 million light years away in the constellation of Pyxis, it presents two contrasting features with respect to our galaxy; it forms huge numbers of stars and it hosts an enormous BH in its center, much bigger that what could be expected by its galactic size.

Galaxies that form stars at exceptionally high rates -star nurseries- create stellar newborns up to 1000 times faster than our galaxy, and are called Starburst galaxies. ESO 495-21 is a dwarf starburst galaxy because it is small in size. Usually we would expect that bigger the galaxy more massive the BH in its center. If our galaxy hosts Sagittarius A*, a supermassive BH over four million times as massive as our Sun, one would expect Henize 2-10 -the BH at the center of ESO- to be much smaller. But, the second intriguing observation is that ESO 495-21 galaxy -a 3% size of our galaxy- hosts a supermassive BH at its core, million times as massive as our Sun, too!

This extremely unusual scenario raises questions about our current astrophysical models and the relation between Black holes, galaxies and the universe. This finding is a strong indication that black holes may have come first, and that galaxies form and evolve around them. The question is, how?

do the galaxies form first and then crush material at their centers into black holes, or do pre-existing black holes gather galaxies around them? Do they evolve together—or could the answer be something else entirely?

– ESA/Hubble Information Centre

The NASA/ESA studied the activity bursts and explored the very dense regions a few million years old within ESO 495-21, and the data comprising the images were gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope with the advance camera for surveys and the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

RSF in perspective:

This finding is a strong indication that Black Holes came first, so then a question remains… how can a galaxy form and evolve around it, if we have believed BHs to be devouring monsters? The Unified theory developed by Nassim Haramein finds that BHs not only came first but they are in fact the responsible for the matter and posterior galaxy formation, as he has claimed for more than 25 years. Fortunately, astronomical observations not only have been unable to discard his findings and on the contrary, they point out in that same direction. In this sense we could literally say that the BH at the core IS the pumping heart of the galaxy.

By Ines Urdaneta, Research Scientist at RSF

More at:

Hubble observed tiny galaxy with big heart: https://phys.org/news/2019-06-hubble-tiny-galaxy-big-heart.html

Distant worlds under many suns

Is Earth the only habitable planet in the universe or are there more worlds somewhere out there that are capable of supporting life? And if there are, what might they look like? In a bid to answer these fundamental questions, scientists are searching space for exoplanets: distant worlds that orbit other stars outside our solar system.

More than 4,000 exoplanets are known to date, most of them orbiting single stars like our Sun. Now astrophysicist Dr Markus Mugrauer of Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, has discovered and characterised many new multiple star systems that contain exoplanets. The findings confirm assumptions that the existence of several stars influences the process by which planets are formed and develop. The study by Mugrauer, of the Astrophysical Institute and University Observatory of the University of Jena, has now been published in the specialist journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Space telescope provides precise data

"Multiple star systems are very common in our Milky Way," explains Mugrauer. "If such systems include planets, they are of particular interest to Astrophysics, because the planetary systems in them can differ from our solar system in fundamental ways." To find out more about these differences, Mugrauer searched more than 1,300 exoplanet host stars with exoplanets orbiting them to see whether they have companion stars. To this end, he accessed the precise observation data of the Gaia space telescope, which is operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).

In this way, he succeeded in demonstrating the existence of around 200 companion stars to planetary host stars that are up to 1,600 light years away from the Sun. With the help of the data, Mugrauer was also able to characterise the companion stars and their systems in more detail. He found that there are both tight systems with distances of only 20 astronomical units (au) -- which in our solar system corresponds approximately to the distance between the Sun and Uranus -- as well as systems with stars that are over 9,000 au from each other.

Red and white dwarfs

The companion stars also vary as to their mass, temperature and stage of evolution. The heaviest among them weigh 1.4 times more than our Sun, while the lightest have only 8 per cent of the Sun's mass. Most of the companion stars are low-mass, cool dwarf stars that glow faintly red. However, eight white dwarfs were also identified among the faint stellar companions. A white dwarf is the burnt-out core of a sun-like star, which is only about as big as our Earth, but half as heavy as our Sun. These observations show that exoplanets can indeed survive the final evolutionary stage of a nearby sun-like star.

Double, triple and quadruple star systems with exoplanets

The majority of the star systems with exoplanets identified in the study have two stars. However, some two dozen hierarchical triple star systems and even a quadruple star system were detected. In the range of distances investigated, of between approximately 20 and 10,000 astronomical units, a total of 15 per cent of the stars studied have at least one companion star. This is only about half the frequency expected in general for solar-like stars. In addition, the companion stars detected show distances about five times greater than in ordinary systems.

"These two factors taken together could indicate that the influence of several stars in a star system disrupts the process of planet formation as well as the further development of their orbits," says Mugrauer. The cause of this could be first the gravitational impact of a stellar companion on the gas and dust disc in which planets form around their host star. Later, the gravitation of the stellar companion influences the motion of the planets around their host star.

Markus Mugrauer would like to pursue the project further. In the future, too, the multiplicity of newly discovered planetary host stars would be studied using data from the Gaia mission and any companion stars detected would be precisely characterised. "In addition, we will combine the results with those of an international observational campaign, which we are currently conducting on the same topic at the Paranal Observatory of the European Southern Observatory in Chile," added Mugrauer. "We will then be able to investigate the precise influence of stellar multiplicity on the formation and development of planets."